Posted tagged ‘Media’

Sunny Hostin: Saying the Media Is Biased Is ‘Dangerous and Wrong’

August 3, 2016

Sunny Hostin: Saying the Media Is Biased Is ‘Dangerous and Wrong’, MRC NewsBustersKristine Marsh, August 2, 2016

(Video at the link. Please see, for example, Mainstream Media: ‘Trump Boots Baby From Rally!’ Non-Media Witnesses: ‘That’s Pure Propaganda’  All Bold face print is from the original.— DM)

view

In a segment that seemed to be catered for the Media Research Center today, The View panel argued for half the show on whether or not media bias exists. ABC Senior Legal Correspondent Sunny Hostin was the most vocal liberal panelist who sparred with FNC’s Jedediah Bila who first brought up the topic. Before Bila could even finish her sentence, Hostin jumped in to shake her head emphatically and state that media bias didn’t exist. “That’s not true. Only if you watch Fox News everyday,” she added.

The topic first got brought up when the panel talked about Trump’s claim that the election might be rigged. Jedediah Bila brought up that it reminded her of another Republican complaint: media bias. Bila argued that there was indeed a liberal media bias but Republicans should just recognize it and move on. She couldn’t finish her thought, however because the other panelists jumped in to attack her point that media bias even existed.

BILA: This is similar to me when they say well, the media is biased. Yes, the media is largely biased against Republicans, deal with it.

HOSTIN: I don’t believe that.[Shaking her head] That’s not true.

BILA: No, it’s true, C’mon–

HOSTIN: That’s not true.Only if you watch Fox News everyday.

After cutting to a commercial break, Bila started off the segment by defending the idea that there is a liberal bias in the media.

BILA: It is biased. I accept the premise, what my argument was I accept the premises it was biased. In 2014 there was a poll and they concluded, Politico ran a study on it, 7% of reporters defined themselves as Republican. I think if you look across the media, you have to say, okay, there is a bias. The media tends to go to journalism school and look at academia. The majority tend to tilt left.

Hostin jumped in to condemn Bila’s claim as “very dangerous” before making up a wonky definition of “media bias.”

HOSTIN: That’s so ludicrous.

BEHAR: You mean only liberals go to college?

BILA [to Hostin]: You don’t think academia is biased in general?

HOSTIN: I think it’s very dangerous because what you’re saying because you’re saying the media is biased in terms of government influence over — and I think covert censorship. What you see in North Korea, and what you see in —

BILA: No, I’m not saying it’s from the government.

HOSTIN:–We don’t see that.  That’s a true definition of media bias, Jed.

BILA: [shaking head] No.

Curiously enough, of all people, Whoopi Goldberg and Sara Haines agreed with Bila that media bias exists. They didn’t agree wholeheartedly about why it exists or how it functions but they both agreed that there was media bias.

Hostin couldn’t be swayed, however. She continued her tirade, saying Bila was “throwing flames out there” by even suggesting that there was a bias in the media.

HOSTIN:  What we see here, we have true journalists. Like a Barbara Walters, like  an Anderson Cooper, like Morley Safer, like Diane Sawyer, Christiane Amanpour. I’ve worked with Christiane. I’ve worked with Anderson Cooper.They are true journalists. [applause] They are not biased.

BILA: There are some, there are some, I work with them all the time—

HOSTIN: This notion that the media is biased–You’re, you’re like throwing flames out there.

She later added:

HOSTIN: True journalists tell a story down the line, true journalists- So the suggestion you’re making is the media is biased, it’s dangerous and wrong.

Throughout the whole segment, Bila would repeatedly defend her opinion by qualifying, “I’m not saying every journalist is biased. I work with journalists all day long.” She was simply saying that “media bias exists.”

At the close, right before a commercial, Hostin threw in a final jab at Bila’s employer, Fox News Channel.

BILA: I’d like to see more of what you’re describing, though. I would like to see those old school people who came out and you legitimately couldn’t —

HOSTIN: They’re there.

BILA: But more of them.

HOSTIN: They’re there, Just change the channel, Jed. [applause] Just change the channel.

Mainstream Media: ‘Trump Boots Baby From Rally!’ Non-Media Witnesses: ‘That’s Pure Propaganda’

August 3, 2016

Mainstream Media: ‘Trump Boots Baby From Rally!’ Non-Media Witnesses: ‘That’s Pure Propaganda’, PJ MediaDavid Steinbergg, August 3, 2016

trump and baby

A good proportion of the global media-consuming populace currently believes that Donald Trump, at a rally in Loudoun County, Virginia, this week, angrily booted a crying baby from the premises during his speech.

But it turns out the story is not that “Trump Hates Babies.” The story is that dishonest media professionals understood that variations of “Trump Hates Babies” make for fantastic headlines.

Read this Facebook post from Will Estrada, who attended the rally:

Today I went to the Donald Trump rally in Ashburn, VA. Since I know good people can disagree over whether or not to support Trump, I am just going to post some candid thoughts below. I report, you decide!Since I am the chairman of the Loudoun County Republican Committee, I was working with the campaign in advance of the rally. On Monday evening, a senior Trump staffer emailed me and asked me if I would be willing to give the invocation at the rally. I said I’d be happy to, but I also told him that as a born again Christian, I end my prayers with “I pray all of this in the name of Jesus.” Since I know that in this day and age mentionoing the name of Jesus can offend some people, I said I’d understand if they preferred that someone else give the invocation. His response to me was: “We know that’s how you pray, that’s why we asked you.”

After the welcome (by John Whitbeck), invocation (by yours truly), pledge (by Sheriff Michael Chapman), and National Anthem (by Briar Woods High School Teacher Nina Peyton), we waited back stage to get a photo with Donald Trump. And then – he was there, with a crowd of staff, Loudoun County Sheriff’s deputies, and Secret Service. I was immediately struck by his presence – he radiates confidence, but also I was struck by his soft spoken demeanor. He spoke softly and thoughtfully the entire time we were backstage.

The first person to get a photo with him was an older man. We had been chatting before-hand while all of us were waiting for Trump to arrive, and he introduced himself as Lieutenant Colonel Louis Dorfman and he had served in the 82nd Airborne. He shook hands with Donald Trump, and handed him his Purple Heart saying he wanted Trump to have it as thanks for standing up for wounded vets. Trump was surprised and said something like “I can’t take this!” We were all surprised and not expecting this. It was pretty cool to see the respect this veteran had for Trump.

Then it was my turn to shake hands with Trump and get my photo taken. I told Mr. Trump that I was the chairman of the Loudoun County Republican Committee and he immediately stopped and looked at me: “Will, how do I win Loudoun?” he asked me. We started talking and he called over one of his staffers. “George, these people here in Virginia know what we need to do to win Virginia.” And then – in a really cool turn of events – John Whitbeck, the GOP chairs of Prince William County and Arlington County, Trump’s campaign staffer, and me are all huddled in a corner, photos forgotten, strategizing on how Trump will win Virginia. Trump didn’t do a lot of talking. He listened to all of us, he made sure his staff had our emails, and he said that we would have everything we needed.

As we finished up the photos, Trump looked at all the Sheriff’s Deputies. “Let’s get them in the photo,” he said. And then he was taking group photos with all of the cops. They loved it. In fact, my favorite photo I took was all of the deputies with Trump (I’ll post it tomorrow). I was struck by how Trump didn’t forget the “little people.” Even though it was just a few of us and no media, he was relaxed and took the time to get photos with everyone.

The rally itself was super cool. Lots of energy, packed room (something like 2000 people had to be turned away because the auditorium was packed – and just on 24 hours notice!), everyone stood the entire time even though they all had seats. One thing I want to mention is the baby crying, because that has been national news. Contrary to news stories, it was a very funny thing, Trump was very supportive of the mom calling her and her baby “beautiful” and “wonderful”, and then when the baby kept crying he turned it into a joke. Everyone was laughing and it was actually very endearing and funny. Not at all anti mom or anti baby like the media has portrayed it to be.

Which brings me to the final point: I was there and saw and heard the entire event with the mom and baby. There was nothing to it. But then after I’m reading all the news coverage saying “Trump hates moms and babies!!!” I started to doubt myself. Did I really miss a huge story right in front of me? I started asking others who were there, including a husband and wife with young kids. And everyone in the room said the same thing: there was no story here. Trump was being funny and personable and going out of his way to make sure the mom wasn’t embarrased by making it a funny situation.

My conclusion is that the media is selling us a narrative. Be very skeptical of what the media is telling you, because I saw it with my own eyes and it was something very different.

Folks, that was a first-hand account from an attendee of the rally, who says he was unable to find another rally attendee who saw the exchange as anything but polite — and a forgettable, not-newsworthy event.

Meanwhile, the civilized world has since been informed by the media that didn’t bother to find a single rally attendee who saw the exchange as anything but polite.

Click to the next page to read what they instead chose to report.

Rolling Stone — Donald Trump Hates Babies: Why Bad Parents Make Bad Presidents:

Trump’s supporters were quick to dismiss the moment as a joke. But joke or not (it wasn’t), it was almost unfathomably cruel. He didn’t just humiliate a woman already dealing with the extraordinarily stressful situation of a crying baby in a public forum, he made it clear to a roomful of people he wants to vote for him in November that his needs always, always come first.

Rolling Stone — having learned nothing about checking multiple sources after Sabrina Erdely almost brought down the company — not only didn’t bother to see if any attendee witnessed the exchange differently, it jumped directly to the type of language that better fits the behavior of ISIS.

The Guardian — Donald Trump’s treatment of a crying baby reveals his total lack of empathy:

For a certain kind of Trump devotee, there’s nothing he can do that will repel them: as he himself has noted, he could stand on Fifth Avenue shooting people and they’d still vote for him.For others, though, it might play out differently. The most obvious group is women …

Well, it only “might play out differently” for women because the Guardian really wants it to play out differently for women, and thus attached the despicable headline.

Politico: Trump at rally: ‘Get the baby out of here’:

Later Tuesday afternoon, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine couldn’t help himself from cracking a joke at Trump’s expense …

Politico printed a quote from the opposing vice presidential candidate, didn’t bother to print a quote from … a rally attendee.

CNNTrump: ‘You can get the baby out of here’

NPRTrump: ‘Get That Baby Out Of Here’

New York TimesDonald Trump Jousts With a Crying Baby at His Rally

Daily BeastDonald Trump to Baby at Rally: Crying Is for Losers

US WeeklyDonald Trump Tells Crying Infant’s Mom to Leave His Rally: ‘Get the Baby Out of Here’

Mr. Kahn – The Con. This Is Purely About Money.

August 3, 2016

Mr. Kahn – The Con. This Is Purely About Money, Town HallBryan Crabtree, August 3, 2016

Kahn con

But, First…

The reason we have to elect Donald Trump is because we need to numb the American people to the distortion and lies of the media and politicians. The more of this hysteria we experience, the tougher our emotional skin will become.

Trump commented on Tuesday in a campaign rally that he could essentially find the cure for a terminal disease and the reaction from the media and his opponents would be negative. Essentially, there is no accountability for lies in our culture and very little incentive for the truth any longer. Sensationalism sells.

Even worse, the distortion of reality is so horrendous that people are afraid to talk, to express their feelings and share their concerns any longer (for fear of attack). By electing Trump, we ensure that these frauds are left alone on their island of lies. At some point, the American people will no longer be willing to listen to the punditry of outrage created by a sentence or two uttered by Trump in a minutes-long discussion. It just takes time for us to arrive at that point.

In essence, Trump will make it acceptable again to be candid, to push back on the wrongs of society, and to force change. This will happen because he sets the “PC-bar” so much higher than our current standard of political correctness will allow.

As an example, Khizr Khan, who spoke very negatively about Trump at the Democratic National Convention, has become a media sensation. During an interview on Tuesday with Eric Trump, Gayle King read a statement, “when you question a mother’s pain by implying her religion, not her pain, you are attacking…”  This is out of context and false. Trump did not question her pain or grief. He pointed to the fact that she didn’t speak.

In an interview on CNN, Mrs. Khan stated that their beliefs were that the husband was in charge outside of the household and that she was in charge inside the household. This is incredibly important because we have now discovered that Mr. Khan operates an immigration law firm, has written extensively in his support of Sharia Law, has ties to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and has associations with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Captain Khan is a war hero who made the ultimate sacrifice –  Mrs. Khan is clearly a grieving mother. Mr. Khan appears to be a con who used his dead son as a political shield in order to attack Trump. At first she had a medical condition, then she spoke. I think Trump nailed it.

Why did Kahn attack? If Donald Trump institutes a ban on Middle Eastern immigration it would essentially put Mr. Khan’s law firm out of business. This isn’t about his son; it’s about money. But America is scantily interested in all of the details because we’d rather be outraged or optimistically delusional as opposed to enlightened.

I have frequently said that it is a bad idea to listen to the political ideas of grieving parents.  The only exception would be in the case of Patricia Smith, who is telling a story of how  she was treated by Hillary Clinton after her son was killed in Benghazi. She has direct experience with the character of the Democratic candidate for the presidency. Kahn does not.

The Kahn story has nothing to do with Trump except that Mr. Kahn’s law firm would be financially harmed by Trump’s proposed ban on certain countries’ immigration-ban. In other words, he could no longer sell citizenship to the highest bidder with a President Trump.

Americans are progressively using their tragedies as manipulations and cover for their financial, political and social aspirations. Monetizing a family tragedy is purely evil. At some point every tragedy will make most conversations off-limits.

In this case it was a Gold Star family. But, how about the parents who demand your guns be taken away because some crazy person killed their son or daughter at a school? Do we have to be silent while those parents conflate their pain and grief into taking away our rights?

How about the dad who wants to pressure local politicians to close the neighborhood bar because some drunk killed his child driving home at midnight? Are we supposed to ignore that as an ‘off-limits’ topic. After all, it was the drunk’s lack of personal responsibility that created the accident – not the bar!

How about actor Paul Walker’s daughter who decided to sue Porsche because he died in a fiery crash as a result of driving at roughly double the posted speed limit in California? Are we supposed to sit back, because of her grief, and say nothing while her lawyers slander a business due to her father’s irresponsible and reckless driving? His death is sad and tragic but regretfully, his fault.

Who was outraged about the fact that Black Lives Matters was chanting in the middle of a moment of silence for fallen police officers who were assassinated just prior to the DNC? Not the mainstream media!

The outrage and hysteria created by most of what Trump says is fascinating to me. It reveals an emotionally immature society who can’t handle even an ounce of candor.

I find it disgusting that Mr. Khan would use his hero son, Capt. Khan, as a political shield for his financial grievances (dragging his wife through such additional trauma) in the same way ISIS uses elementary schools full of children, as cover, to fire at our soldiers.

If you let situations like this affect your vote for Trump, you will be allowing the enemy to take control of your future.

Cartoons of the Day

July 25, 2016

H/t Vermont Loon Watch

Hillary Clinton Holds Primary Night Event In Brooklyn, New York

 

H/t Power Line

Thelma-copy

 

memo to media

The Real Implications of Deborah Wasserman Schultz’s Resignation

July 25, 2016

The Real Implications of Deborah Wasserman Schultz’s Resignation, PJ MediaRoger L Simon, July 24, 2016

deb computer

The most fascinating aspect of the controversy over the Democratic National Committee’s hacked emails that has resulted in Deborah Wasserman Schultz’s resignation—a quasi firing—is that everything was fine with Wasserman-Schultz until… she got caught.

While some Democrats, particularly Bernie supporters, were annoyed with Debbie before” Guccifer 2.0″ exposed the DNC emails, those same emails demonstrating favoritism to Hillary Rodham Clinton by the supposedly even-handed committee were readily available to a whole stream of people who never said word one.

It would be interesting to compile an annotated list of who they are, who was on the various rounds. Do they include those, like David Axelrod, who suddenly and eagerly called for Wasserman Schultz to bow out? I’d bet on some surprises. Whatever the case, were I a Sanders supporter, which I am not, I would obviously be furious.

It is quite possible that Bernie Sanders would currently be the Democratic Party nominee for president were it not for this conspiracy against him. We will never know. He came remarkably close even while enduring it. (I would imagine if a conspiracy surfaces on email, out of digital form in cloakroom whispers, it is even more pervasive.)

What is astonishing is that Sanders himself has turned into a eunuch, rolling over for this on the morning shows by making light of the situation. One can only wonder what his supporters think now that their hero is a sellout. (Perhaps they will learn the value of the missing Eleventh Commandment—”Never trust your leaders.”)

That the DNC server was so easily hacked is also quite astonishing since the break-in occurred after the Hillary Clinton email server story became front-page news. Don’t these people learn anything?

I am far from an expert in cybersecurity, but having run an online media company for seven years, I forced myself to learn enough to see the obvious—that those who hacked into the DNC server and other email accounts such as Sidney Blumenthal’s to Hillary Clinton, as was done by the original Guccifer, were simply clever amateurs, patient enough to guess their way in with simple-minded passwords.  For the highly-trained sophisticated intelligence services of China, Russia, Germany, Israel, the UK, France, Pakistan and Iran (to name just a few) with access to super computers, such break-ins would be so routine they might be done in ten minutes. Our own NSA might have done in it three minutes. Maybe they did.

How did this outright cyber stupidity on the part of the DNC and Clinton come to pass? Two words: arrogance and corruption. They work together brilliantly.

How could you possibly trust these people to manage the war against radical Islam where cybersecurity is increasingly paramount? ISIS has certainly mastered YouTube. Who knows what else they can do?  Sooner or later, they or their progeny will know plenty.

How the media plays this story will be revelatory. They treated Melania Trump’s cribbing a few lines of the most banal boilerplate from a Michelle Obama speech as a catastrophe that could upend a campaign.  This is a hydrogen bomb by comparison. The governing committee of one of our two principal political parties attempted to steal an election—and was supremely incompetent in the process!

If the media does not meet its responsibility with this story and pursue it to the end, they will be exposing the bias we all know to such a degree they are endangering their own survival. The public, as Trump’s candidacy indicates, not to mention the polls, already despises the media. That same media may seem invincible, but they are vulnerable in their bottom line. Everybody is.

Still no confidence in the MSM? If you’re interested in searching the DNC email database yourself, you can do so here.

AND THIS UPDATE:  People say they’re confused by the latest revelation that after having “resigned” from the DNC, Wasserman Schutlz has just been hired by Hillary’s campaign. I’m not. Washerman Schultz knows a great deal. Clinton would never want her angry and running off the reservation talking to people. As the man said, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”

MOST AMUSING BS IN THE STORY SO FAR:  Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook claiming that the email leak was a Russian plot to get Donald Trump elected. WikiLeaks made fun of that one quickly enough. It’s sort of the equivalent of Hillary blaming her husband’s adulteries on “the great rightwing conspiracy.” It’s such a boldfaced lie you have to admire the person for having the guts to tell it. I rather doubt Putin is shivering in his boots over a President Hillary “Reset Button” Clinton.

Munich All Over Again

July 23, 2016

Munich All Over Again, PJ Media, Roger L Simon, July 22, 2016

munich then and now

[M]y fury is directed at the Democratic Party leadership, their complacent media and the rest of the morally narcissistic cohort from Hollywood to academia who have allowed this global epidemic of Islamic terrorism to grow and thrive.

They didn’t do this alone, of course, but they have contributed big time and continue to contribute, all the while doing so to preserve their pathetic grip on power. They brand Donald Trump as an unreliable blowhard, when they are something far worse — reliable enablers of evil.

**************************

When I was en route back to L.A. from the Republican National Convention and got word of the latest terror attack in Munich, shivers went down my proverbial spine.

Munich — déjà vu all over again.

It’s a while ago, 1972, that Palestinian terrorists massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympics in that city, but that particular monstrosity came back into the news as recently as December 2015 with the release of a documentary far more potent than the pallid Steven Spielberg film on the subject. Apparently, the terrorists tortured the athletes before killing them, going so far as to castrate one in front of his teammates. (Spielberg and Tony Kushner, creepily, tried to make the Israeli revenge the moral equivalent of the Palestinians’ atrocities. Well, ignorance is bliss, I suppose.)

These and other horrifying details had been covered up for years by the German police — an interesting fact to ponder as we watch what is transpiring now and listen to the reports. As of now we know the new Munich killer was an 18-year old German-Iranian (some reports just say Iranian) who, according to at least one witness, a Muslim woman, yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he sprayed people with bullets; many were children. Early speculation he may have been a right-wing extremist appears to have faded.  A particularly scary report from the Daily Mail says police are investigating a fake ad on Facebook advertising free food at McDonald’s. The killer stood in front of a McDonald’s when he fired. Jihadi groups have advised killing children first because it inflicts the greatest pain on the community. Who knows where this will lead?

Our leaders, as we have been reminded in the last few days from France, tend to be tardy about informing the public on what actually is happening during terror incidents, often bowdlerizing or misdirecting the truth for dubious ends. The monster of Nice, we were told, was a loner only recently converted to radical Islam (and therefore somehow exonerated), when it turned out he and his Islamist co-conspirators had been meticulously planning their mass-murdering truck attack for months.

Oh, well. So it was in Nice and Paris and San Bernardino, so it was in Munich then and now — homicidal rage generated by sick religious ideology.

But it goes back further. Maybe it’s something in the water trickling down from the Bavarian alps, but Munich was holy ground to a group that got considerable support from the Islamic world through their great ally the grand mufti of Jerusalem — the Nazi Party, of course.

No political party had greater ties to Munich, from Hitler’s original speeches at the Hofbrauhaus to the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch to this place only 31 minutes from downtown on the A99. Indeed, Munich is no stranger to terrorism — on the grandest scale in human history.

That doesn’t mean the current citizens deserve to be shot. Far from it. But we should pay special attention when the bodies pile up in this epicenter of human villainy — if there is to be any hope at all for humanity. So when I saw President Obama grinning and making jokes in the midst of this madness, I wanted to puke.

This is the “Diary of a Mad Voter”and I have to say right now this voter is really mad, not just mad as in crazy or mad as in angry, but mad as in furious. And my fury is directed at the Democratic Party leadership, their complacent media and the rest of the morally narcissistic cohort from Hollywood to academia who have allowed this global epidemic of Islamic terrorism to grow and thrive.

They didn’t do this alone, of course, but they have contributed big time and continue to contribute, all the while doing so to preserve their pathetic grip on power. They brand Donald Trump as an unreliable blowhard, when they are something far worse — reliable enablers of evil.

Excessive?  I don’t think so. Look at the record as you listen to the news reports from Munich or wherever it happens next (and it certainly will). Go back and read Obama’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg (speaking of enablers) when the president called ISIS — now metastasizing to the four corners of the world — the jayvee team.  Go back… well, no matter… you get the point.  The litany is long.  When will it end?

 

Terrorism in The Therapeutic Age

July 21, 2016

Terrorism in The Therapeutic Age, Front Page MagazineBruce Thornton, July 21, 2016

therapy

We know what is going to follow the latest terrorist murder in Nice. Shrines to the dead will instantly spring up. Conclaves of citizens will gather at sorrowful demonstrations filled with ecumenical clichés. The media will profile selected victims, wringing every ounce of pathos out of their tragedy. Twitter will be inundated with sentimental bromides and ephemeral hashtags, and politicians will give solemn and empty speeches laced with even emptier threats.

Welcome to terror in a therapeutic age.

What we will not read are passionate demands from most citizens of Western governments that mind-concentrating force be unleashed on those responsible for the latest slaughter of the innocents. Nor will we hear stirring speeches from our political leaders that forcefully make the moral case for war against the murderers and their enablers.

Obsessing over feelings and emotions is what many moderns reflexively substitute for meaningful action. Righteous anger and burning revenge of the sort that fired up Americans after the Pearl Harbor attacks are too “mean” and “hurtful,” and require a serious commitment and exorbitant risk. Displaying emotion is cheap and gratifying and offends no one. Indeed, such displays demonstrate the purveyors’ superior “we are the world” sensibilities and sensitivity. It is “conspicuous compassion,” as Alan Bloom called it, as much a status symbol as Veblen’s conspicuous consumption. It’s how people show themselves to be civilized and advanced, too sophisticated for retrograde emotions like avenging anger. That’s so Old Testament.

In the therapeutic world, conflict is to be resolved by peace, love, and understanding. Or as our Attorney General said after the Orlando jihadist massacre, “Our common humanity transcends our differences, and our most effective response to terror is compassion, it’s unity and it’s love.” Thus the institutional instruments for resolving our differences with the jihadists are diplomatic engagement, foreign aid, economic development, negotiated agreements, and careful nurturing of our enemies’ self-esteem. We must flatter them, stroke their egos, attend to their grievances, censor any unpleasant facts about their religion. Pretend, as Obama does, that Islam, the “religion of peace” and has absolutely nothing to do with Muslim terrorism, or what he prefers to call “violent extremists.” Assert, like Hillary, “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

The problem is, we live in a world of people with radically different ideas about the goods they should pursue, and who don’t give a damn about “peace, love, understanding,” or the opinions of Western infidels about their religion. Whatever their potential is for possessing and recognizing a “common humanity,” in practice this possibility remains mostly unexpressed in their traditional religious tenets. Rather, Muslim jihadists––and hundreds of millions of ordinary Muslims–– limit their compassion, sympathy, and respect for humanity to fellow Muslims, and deny them to the infidel or heretic. That’s why zakat, the personal obligation for Muslims to make charitable contributions, for the most part restricts that charity to other Muslims.

The only “common humanity” pious Muslims recognize is the divine obligation for all humans to become Muslim. Their highest goods are not democracy, prosperity, leisure, and tolerance, but obedience to Allah and his laws. And millions of them view violence in the name of Allah as the divinely justified instrument for creating a world in which “all men say there is no god but Allah.”

Appeals to a “common humanity,” then, are useless as appeasing flattery for dealing with a man who, willing to die and kill in the name of Allah, drives a truck over men, women, and children, killing, mangling, and dismembering them. Flattery only confirms the jihadist’s belief that the infidel West is populated by godless hedonists eager only to enjoy life for one more day, and so are willing to sacrifice their freedom and rights for the short-term pleasures of la dolce vita. They are unworthy of compassion, for they no longer know what is worth dying and killing for. They have forgotten what Lincoln called the “awful arithmetic,” the tragic reality that some people must die today so that more people don’t die later––the gruesome calculus that the Allies followed to defeat fascism, Japanese imperialism, and Nazism.

Over forty years ago, the great Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his Nobel lecture identified this chronic weakness that permeates the West:

The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich is dominant in the twentieth century. The intimidated civilized world has found nothing to oppose the onslaught of a suddenly resurgent fang-baring barbarism, except concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a disease of the will of prosperous people; it is the daily state of those who have given themselves over to a craving for prosperity in every way, to material well-being as the chief goal of life on earth. Such people––and there are many of them in the world today––choose passivity and retreat, anything if only life to which they are accustomed might go on, anything so as not to have to cross over to rough terrain today, because tomorrow, see, everything will be all right. But it never will! The reckoning for cowardice will only be more cruel. Courage and the power to overcome will be ours only when we dare to make sacrifices.

These comments about the Soviet Union and the West are just as true today about the “fang-baring barbarism” of Islamic jihad. The surreal denial of the nature of the enemy and his religious motivations; the symbolic military gestures that serve public relations and political advantage rather than a strategy for defeating the enemy; the unwillingness to accept the eternal tragic realities of war and instead create suicidal rules of engagement vetted by pettifogging lawyers; and the refusal of citizens to pay the price necessary for destroying the enemy––all reflect the disease that Solzhenitsyn identified.

The problem is one of morale, not ability. We can destroy ISIS. Even the fictional Peter Quinn, from the series Homeland, knows how: put 200,000 troops in a country indefinitely or “bomb Raqqa into a parking lot.” In the real world, Asia Times columnist “Spengler” agrees. Wage total war both against the enemy abroad and against fellow travelers and sympathizers at home.

But don’t hold your breath. The political will for such action does not exist among a significant number of Americans. They would rather feel than act. Meanwhile, they indulge lachrymose sentiment, a luxury of the pampered rich. They call for “diplomacy” and “engagement,” the tried and true camouflage for the fear to act. They prefer to spend money on more and more government provided “butter” rather than on guns, as they move on to the next episode of televised tragedy in between bouts of Pokémon Go.

Meanwhile, the reckoning for our cowardice grows ever closer and ever crueler.

How the Media Covers up Muslim and #Blacklivesmatter Terrorism

July 19, 2016

How the Media Covers up Muslim and #Blacklivesmatter Terrorism, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, July 19, 2016

gavin-long-2

No sooner are the bloodstains and bits of human flesh hosed off the concrete from the latest Muslim or #BlackLivesMatter terrorist attack and the grieving families ushered through the cold metal doors of impersonal morgues to identify the bodies of their loved ones that the vultures of the media rise above a wounded city and begin spinning the same old lies.

The propaganda, the artful selection and deselection of facts, have become as familiar to us as they were to any of the residents of the Soviet Union or North Korea. Anyone who pays attention knows not only that they are being lied to, but can easily predict the lies that they will be told on the evening news even before they actually hear them being spoken out loud.

We always knew that the Muslim terrorist, even before he was identified, would turn out to be a secular loner who was depressed over his family life. All the media had to do with Mohammed Bouhlel, the Islamic terrorist who murdered 84 people in Nice, France was to replay the same exact narrative as the one that they had fed us with Omar Mateen, the Islamic terrorist who murdered 49 people in Orlando.

Irreligious, depressed loner with family problems. Check. No connection to Islamic terrorism. Suggestion of mental illness. Check and check. Insistence on his lack of interest in religion? One final check.

Mohammed shouted “Allahu Akbar,” the ancient Muslim battle cry that originated with Mohammed’s murder of Jews whose meaning is that Allah is greater than the deities of non-Muslims, but the media persists in its dedication to burying the truth in a shallow unmarked grave at midnight behind CNN headquarters.

Gavin Eugene Long aka Cosmo Setepenra, who murdered three police officers in Baton Rouge, was also unstable. Much like Dallas cop-killer Micah Johnson, who was also another “unstable loner.”

What do Mohammed and Gavin, Micah and Omar all have in common? They’re inconvenient killers.

The left supports the ideologies, black nationalism and Islam, in whose name they carried out their crimes so the media has to redirect attention away from the ideology to the individual.

It doesn’t matter that the killers were very clear about their motives. What matters is hiding the truth.

Every Muslim or #BlackLivesMatter terrorist is just a crazy, depressed loner unable to cope with life’s problems. Descriptions emphasize that they were not part of a group; particularly the groups that the media is attempting to carry water for. Instead Micah Johnson was “reclusive” even though he spent his time partying with a laundry list of racist black nationalist groups, including the New Black Panther Party.

Omar Mateen was a “loner.” Mohammed Bouhlel, the Nice killer, was a “troubled, angry loner with little interest in Islam”. Or perhaps he was a “bitter loner” or even a “weird loner” who became “depressed.”

The key word here is “loner.” Loners aren’t part of a group. When you call a Muslim terrorism a loner or a #BlackLivesMatter terrorist “reclusive”, then there’s no need to look at the movement they were part of. Loners have no movements. Neither do recluses. They’re just “weird” and “unstable” people who go crazy for incomprehensible reasons.

Like depression. Or the weather.

Propaganda rarely gets more obvious than this.

And it’s not just the media. The “troubled loner” narrative comes from the very top down.

Obama insisted that it was “very hard to untangle the motives” of the Dallas cop killer and that he would leave it to “psychologists” but that “the danger is that we somehow suggest the act of a troubled individuals speaks to some larger political statement across the country.”

Micah Johnson had been very clear about his motives. He was a black nationalist activist angry about #BlackLivesMatter issues who said that he wanted to kill white police officers.

Obama contended that Johnson was clearly crazy because, “By definition if you shoot people who pose no threat to you, you have a troubled mind.” By that definition, the Nazis were all “troubled.”

But Obama had cultivated no similar ambiguity after the Charleston massacre. Instead in his eulogy he said that Dylann Storm Roof “surely sensed the meaning of his violent act.  It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress.”

And then he demanded that after the actions of one “troubled loner,” the Confederate flag had to come down across the country.

But not all troubled loners are created equal.

Roof’s massacre was part of a larger pattern and a bigger history. But each act of Islamic terrorism or black nationalist violence is purely of the moment and has no larger meaning. Its perpetrators are crazy and their political motives don’t matter. Even though Islamic terrorism has over 1,000 years of history behind it and violence associated with black nationalist groups goes back quite far, neither really exists.

Once again this is what propaganda looks like.

The “troubled loner” narrative is a tactical weapon of spin. When the killer is ideologically convenient, then he’s not a troubled loner, but a representative of a larger political movement. When he’s ideologically inconvenient, then his ideology will hardly be mentioned, only his personal problems.

Your average political terrorist who is willing to kill a bunch of people over the weekend will generally not have the perfect life sitting in his vest pocket. The odds will be very good that his apartment will be messy, his personal life messier and that plenty of people will remember him as a loner or strange.

Of course the same thing could have been said about Adolf Hitler and much of the Nazi elite.

Political radicalism attracts unstable people. This does not mean that we can ignore the ideologies of political radicals by reducing them to personal pathologies. Doing so with a political movement is dishonest and futile. The Nazis could not have been defeated by pretending that they didn’t exist.

It’s the political allies of a terrorist movement who are most likely to play the game of pretending that ideological atrocities are really personal quirks. And that we should focus on the latter not the former.

The media spin on Micah Johnson and Eugene Gavin Long, Omar Mateen and Mohammed Bouhlel is propaganda with a purpose. The purpose is protecting the media’s political allies from being linked to the atrocities being committed by their friendly neighborhood Islamists and black nationalists.

Every Muslim and black nationalist terrorist is crazy. Because the alternative is admitting that both movements use violence to achieve their goals. And that their political allies on the left are complicit in their crimes.

As the violence increases, so do the cover-ups. Anyone who reaches the obvious conclusion about Islamic terrorism and #BlackLivesMatter is dubbed a bigot. A rash of politically motivated killers are dismissed as lunatics. Gun control is revived, not just for its own sake, but as a convenient distraction.

Just as the crimes of Communism dragged the left deeper into the cover-up with each bloody year, so too the crimes of Islam and black nationalism stain the left’s hands a darker shade of red every single month. And eventually there will be no choice left but to bring down the curtain and tell the truth.

Obama Isn’t a “Consoler”, He’s an Arsonist

July 12, 2016

Obama Isn’t a “Consoler”, He’s an Arsonist, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, July 12, 2016

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The media is pushing two wildly dishonest narratives

1. That Micah X was unrepresentative of a movement which routinely celebrates cop killers.

2. That Obama doubling down on the anti-police narrative by backing BLM is “consoling”.

The most insane headline describes him as a “consoler-in-chief”. The nation does not need consoling. It needs to prevent massacres like Dallas from happening again. And the way to do that is to end the support that racist black hate groups like Black Lives Matter and the New Black Panther Party, along with their anti-police narratives, have received from the highest levels of government.

And yes that means Obama.

Obama isn’t a consoler, he’s an arsonist. After the Dallas attack, he continued to defend anti-police incitement while trying to push gun control. That’s not consolation. It’s whitewashing your own crime.

Forensic Psychiatrist: Fascinating Insights Into Orlando Shooting

July 11, 2016

Forensic Psychiatrist: Fascinating Insights Into Orlando Shooting, Clarion ProjectRyan Mauro, July 11, 2016

Omar-Mateen-Noor-Salman-HPNoor Salman and Omar Mateen (Photo: Video screenshot)

Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist renowned for his work both in cutting-edge legal cases and research on criminal evil, explained to Clarion Project that important questions about the wife of Omar Mateen, who attacked a gay club in Florida, remain unanswered.

He also explained how political correctness and the difficulties in discussing Islamism are undermining our ability to combat the ideology.

You can read our previous interview with Dr. Welner here. Below is the latest interview between Clarion Project’s National Security Analyst Ryan Mauro and Dr. Welner :

1. Clarion Project: What’s the significance of Omar Mateen’s wife’s role in Mateen’s actions based on what we currently know?   

Dr. Welner:  Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman, was aware of his objectives to carry out a mass casualty attack, and she could have easily engaged his or her own support system to stop him from doing so.

Mrs. Salman accompanied Mateen during a visit to Disneyworld that caught the attention of Disney security in April. Salman knew Mateen was purchasing offensive weaponry. And not just any gun, but an assault weapon (MCX Sig Sauer) far more expensive than needed for a mass killing – even as Mateen was quite underemployed.

Ms. Salman did not stand in the way of her husband’s activities that would “martyr” himself, knowing that her child would be fatherless and she would be without financial support. Or is there more?

The San Bernadino killers, who long planned the mass killing yet bore a child together, was the watershed of ISIS in America. ISIS has redefined Islamic feminism by embedding women in vital support roles in terror (martyrdom), recruitment and facilitation.

That Mateen was willing to leave a child behind and Salman accepting of same is an idea unthinkable to Americans and to terrorism in America. But it is a mindset indoctrinated in Palestinian life.

Salman, born of Palestinian parents and raised with traditional Islamic restrictions, was first wed in an arranged marriage with a man from the West Bank. She divorced her first husband. Yet she stayed with Mateen, who long claimed aspirations to be a martyr.

Salman did more than stay with Mateen, she admittedly participated with him in preparations for his eventual attack, including driving him to Pulse to case the nightclub. She thus actively supported her husband’s efforts, even she had family living nearby where she could separate herself. She agreed, with Mateen, to sign over the deed to their house two months before the attack on the Pulse nightclub.

Facilitators, collaborators, and handlers are the unseen support of Islamist suicide terror – especially in the Palestinian theater. How did Mateen get the resources for an MCX Sig Sauer? How did he pay for the upscale accommodations of his overseas travel? How does his wife anticipate supporting herself financially in the face of the attack – and having divested herself of her home?

Did he expect to survive, as had the San Bernadino attackers? And what then would have happened? How is it that we do not even know the identity of her first husband’s family? How is it that there is no public discussion about Mateen’s mosque or the influences who inspired him?

2. Clarion Project: When Mateen had outbursts of extremism at work, such as declarations of support for terrorist groups, he blamed it on anti-Muslim discrimination by his colleagues, basically saying that Islamophobia causes Islamic terrorism. Is this just a standard deflection tactic or is there more involved with Islamists’ incessant use of the Islamophobia card?   

Dr. Welner: The American dialogue about the Islamist supremacist movement and, in fact, all of Islam is not based in fact. This is because public impressions and the nature of the dialogue we have are carefully controlled by at least three sources of influence:

1) Unregulated and below-the-radar financial influence on American lawmakers by countries ruled by sharia law,

2) intellectuals and other American media and thought-leader proxies funded by dogmatic Saudi Arabia and Qatari deep pockets. These funding resources, whose assets tie back to their respective governments, export the spread of sharia as a neoconservative would aim to export democracy. Funding now heavily influences university education, think tanks and media and promotes impression management by respected academia deliberately dissimulates and whitewashes Islamist terrorism and its broader goals, and

3) CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, who have been ceded standing by the press to speak for Muslims in America despite a legacy of apologia and of actively teaching the Muslim community to impede law enforcement’s investigations of terror inquiries.

Islamic supremacist advocates and, more importantly, the organizations empowered to speak for Islam are very sensitive to American public opinion and the buttons to push among social activists.

At a time that enhanced interrogations and waterboarding came under scrutiny in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, for example, al-Qaeda was teaching its conscripts to assert that they were tortured when they went into custody.

They could rely upon an academia-media complex that grasped at any opportunity to attack a Republican president through the safe space of declared “social justice.” Al-Qaeda exploited these willing opinion soldiers to fuel public sentiment against Guantanamo Bay and to delegitimize the U.S.-led war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The Islamic supremacists have also cynically co-opted national sensitivities on other fronts. Recognizing the mainstream news media’s identification with black grievances against the police, the Islamists have successfully fused the idea of blacks targeted for their skin color to advance the notion that Muslims are victimized as a direct result of discussion of the centrality of Islam to Islamic supremacist terror incidents.

President Obama, has been the highest authority to subscribe to this false canard. The President has famously disassociated Islamic supremacist terrorism from Islam, often with servile platitudes that embellish Islam’s history in America or submissive deference to “The Prophet.”

The administration has promoted a CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) program that emphasizes the purported risks of “right wing terrorist” groups in America. While the facts demonstrate otherwise, an imposed groupthink has rooted out teaching and training from among law enforcement that engages the Islamist threat with any appreciation for its urgency and current relevance.

References to Islamic terror have been literally erased, right down to “Allah” being airbrushed from transcripts of the Mateen 911 calls.

Political correctness extinguishes any criticism of Islam or its intolerance to alternative lifestyles. This includes speech laws in many otherwise free countries that equate criticism of Islam with hate speech, laws which are enforced particularly as they relate to Islam.

With freedom controlled, even where expression is normally free, the public submits. The psychological intimidation by legal repercussion extends what is accomplished by terror or, if not, by threat of terror.

The consequences have filtered all the way through American life, as they have in Europe. A migrant gang sex assault in Idaho of a small child is suppressed by the local authorities. Nidal Hassan’s advocacy of martyrdom is not sufficient to remove him from active military duty, and when he later embarks on a mass shooting of the troops to whom he was to apply a Hippocratic Oath, the military – which answers to the Commander-in-Chief – insists that it is a work accident.

Unquestionably dangerous prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay, only to return to attack and kill American servicemen and Ankara airport-goers alike.

Surveillance programs that would monitor mosques in which attendees are particularly poisoned to support terrorism shut down, despite court support of their legality and police respect for their effectiveness.

Americans who cared about their country reported concerns about Mateen to entrusted law enforcement agencies, only to have investigations shut down. All of these systemic errors feed back to the active thought control and stifling of free thinking about efforts of the Islamic supremacist movement to gain submission of non-believers.

The first of those affected are Muslims themselves, because open-mindedness is crushed by sharia advocacy as opposed to pluralism advocacy among Muslims.

The only solution is a nonviolent but defiant revolt of free speech that demands that leaders and the news and information media stop lying to our free society about terrorism and its origins.

Only from that point can collaboration then begin between the general public and Muslims who are invested in a pluralistic America to undertake a constructive anti-terror policy that wins the war that we are now losing.

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(We are currently) not losing by terror, but by the success of our Machiavellian enemy (who has been able to) buy the influence of those who do not appreciate that non-violent war is more destructive than terrorism and who exploit our inherent empathic nature as Americans as the first step on the road to submission.